Now that June 30 is over and charities are tallying up their results, it’s time to debrief.

Were you well over target, right on or did you raise less than you hoped? Whatever the case, it’s crucial to debrief on why you got the result you did.

So, what if you didn’t reach your appeal goal? Try to resist the urge to blame others. It’s time to take a closer look at what went wrong – and apply those learnings to future campaigns. An appeal is really only a complete failure if you refuse to learn from your mistakes.

If you don’t know about Gmail tabs then in a nutshell the concern is this.

All those beautifully crafted fundraising emails you send out to your donors with Gmail addresses will end up under a "Promotions tab".

What the heck is the Promotions tab?

In May this year, Google introduced a new tabbed layout. If your donors use Gmail addresses then they can enable up to five tabs. They are Primary, Social, Promotions, Updates and Forums. If enabled, Gmail automatically sorts all incoming messages into those tabs.

And the fear is that your fundraising emails will be less likely to ...

Thank you to the charities that made it easy for me to donate online. Especially since I left it to the last day before June 30. Even though some of you did send me letters and emails throughout May and June asking for gifts.

Despite my best intentions to give earlier, I found myself scrambling on June 29 to actually donate. (I also wondered whether I’d get a tax invoice dated appropriately to claim my tax deduction in that financial year).

That being the case, I was really, really grateful when I found charity websites that:

Right before the end of the financial year, I made online donations to 12 different charities. And with all the buzz about multichannel giving, digital donors and online engagement, I was surprised at how bad the online giving experience was in several cases.

While I won’t name and shame, I will outline some dos and don’ts when it comes to setting up your web donation pages.

After all, you probably spend a lot of effort getting prospective donors to come to your website to give. All those appeal ...